Positive and Negative Liberty
Negative Liberty
Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers, or constraints, allowing actions to be available to an individual.
Positive Liberty
Positive liberty involves acting in a way that takes control of one’s life and realizes one’s fundamental purposes. It is sometimes attributed to collectivities.
Historical Context
The distinction between negative and positive liberty can be traced back to Kant and was further developed by Isaiah Berlin. These concepts are central in political and social philosophy, distinct from but related to discussions about free will and overlapping with work on autonomy.
Rival Interpretations
Negative and positive liberty are competing interpretations of a single political ideal. Political liberalism often assumes a negative definition, limiting state activities, while critics argue positive liberty requires state intervention for self-realization.
Terminology
The terms 'liberty' and 'freedom' are generally used interchangeably, though some attempts have been made to distinguish them.
Two Concepts of Liberty
Negative liberty is the absence of external obstacles. Positive liberty is the presence of self-control and self-determination.
External vs. Internal Factors
Negative freedom focuses on external interferences, while positive freedom considers internal factors affecting autonomy.
Political Implications
Political philosophy debates whether positive freedom is a political concept, achievable through political action, and whether the state should promote it.
Collectivity
Positive freedom is often thought of as achieved through collectivities, like Rousseau’s theory where individual freedom comes from participating in a community's self-control.
Individualist Applications
There are also individualist applications, such as governments creating conditions for self-sufficiency or providing a universal basic income.
Constitutional Liberties
Negative freedom is commonly assumed in liberal defenses of constitutional liberties like freedom of speech and religion, and in arguments against paternalism.
Private Property
It is also often invoked in defense of the right to private property, though some contest its necessity for enhancing negative liberty.
Paradox of Positive Liberty
Positive liberty can lead to authoritarianism. A minority participating in a democratic process might be considered free but still be oppressed.
Organic Conception of society
An organic conception of society might oppress even the majority in the name of liberty, justified by a rational plan devised by wise governors.
Divided Self
The concept of a divided self is central, where a higher, rational self should control a lower self of passions. This can lead to rational individuals forcing others to realize their 'true' selves, potentially ignoring individual wishes.
Negative Camp
The negative camp argues freedom is about external non-prevention, not about realizing desires. Freedom should not be confused with happiness.
Positive Camp
Some positive theorists argue that to be free, one must rid oneself of desires, similar to ascetics. However, this can mask oppression or be a result of external forces like brainwashing.
Sphere of Action
Negative freedom promotes a sphere of action where individuals are sovereign, constrained only by respecting others’ spheres, allowing individuals to develop their faculties fully.
Positive Liberty
Positive liberty involves the growth and autonomous development of an individual’s desires and interests, not merely the absence of obstacles.
Content-Neutral Positive Liberty
Positive liberty concerns the ways in which desires are formed, not the content of those desires. It avoids claiming there is only one right way to live and avoids coercing behavior.
Procedural Account
This procedural account helps identify internal constraints and forms of oppression not traceable to overt coercion.
Social Construction
People’s actual selves are formed in a social context, and their values are shaped by cultural influences, which can be oppressive.
Limiting Effects
It remains to be seen what political actions can promote content-neutral positive liberty without encroaching on negative liberty.
Public Enlightenment
A state promoting positive liberty might intervene through ‘public enlightenment,’ but liberals may view this as paternalistic.
Blindness
From a liberal point of view, blindness to internal constraints can be intentional.
State Intervention
Some liberals make an exception for the education of children to cultivate open minds, though others argue negative liberty includes the right to decide how one’s children should be educated.
Oppression
Some theorists contest the need to refer to internal constraints to understand oppression.
Negative Liberty & Disadvantaged Groups
The negative concept of freedom can be applied to disadvantaged groups. Some social structures may permit liberation for only a few members of a group, creating a form of collective negative unfreedom.
Republican Liberty
Republican liberty emphasizes conditions guaranteeing non-interference, such as a democratic constitution and safeguards against arbitrary government power.
Neo-Roman
Quentin Skinner calls this view ‘neo-Roman,’ while Philip Pettit labels it ‘republican,’ defining freedom as ‘non-domination.’
Non-Domination vs Negative
Non-domination differs from negative freedom because one can experience non-interference without non-domination. It is also distinct from positive freedom, emphasizing participation as instrumental to non-domination.
Political Theorists
Pettit’s idea has gained traction among political theorists, applied to various relationships, but its distinctness from negative freedom remains debated.
Negative Freedom
There is a strong empirical correlation between negative liberty and democratic government. Republican policies are best defended empirically on the basis of the standard negative ideal of freedom.
Act-Combinations
The extent of negative freedom depends on how many different act-combinations are prevented and the probability of future constraints.
Probabilities
Republicans insist that freedom as non-domination requires the impossibility of interference, not just improbability.
Influence
The influence of societal norms affects freedom. But the requirement of impossibility of interference seems over-demanding.
Ignorability of Interference
More recently, some republicans have focused on the ‘ignorability’ of interference, where societal norms constrain the ability of others to frustrate choices, making the possibility of frustration remote enough to ignore.
Three Concepts of Freedom
The jury is still out on whether republicans have successfully carved out a third concept of freedom that is really distinct from those of negative and positive liberty.
Freedom as a Triadic Relation
There is one basic concept of freedom, on which both sides in the debate converge. MacCallum defines the basic concept of freedom as follows: a subject, or agent, is free from certain constraints, or preventing conditions, to do or become certain things.
Triadic Relation
Freedom is a triadic relation between an agent, preventing conditions, and doings or becomings of the agent.
Oppenheim & MacCallum
The definition of freedom as a triadic relation was first put forward in the seminal work of Felix Oppenheim in the 1950s and 60s. What MacCallum did was to generalize this triadic structure so that it would cover all possible claims about freedom, whether of the negative or the positive variety.
Smoker
If we say that the driver is unfree, what we shall probably mean is that an agent, consisting in a higher or rational self, is made unfree by internal, psychological constraints to carry out some rational, authentic or virtuous plan.
Dichotomy
The dichotomy between ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to’ is therefore a false one, and it is misleading to say that those who see the driver as free employ a negative concept and those who see the driver as unfree employ a positive one.
Camp Difference
What these two camps differ over is the way in which one should interpret each of the three variables in the triadic freedom-relation.
Triadic Freedom-Relation
Those whom Berlin places in the negative camp typically conceive of the agent as having the same extension as that which it is generally given in ordinary discourse. Those in the so-called positive camp, on the other hand, often depart from the ordinary notion.
Constraint
Those in Berlin’s positive camp tend to take a wider view of what counts as a constraint on freedom than those in his negative camp: the set of relevant obstacles is more extensive for the former than for the latter.
Purpose
Those in Berlin’s positive camp tend to take a narrower view of what counts as a purpose one can be free to fulfill.
Negative Liberty
Locke, for example, is normally thought of as one of the fathers or classical liberalism and therefore as a staunch defender of the negative concept of freedom.
Analysis of Constraints
Advocates of negative conceptions of freedom typically restrict the range of obstacles that count as constraints on freedom to those that are brought about by other agents.
Social Relation
Unfreedom as mere inability is thought by such authors to be more the concern of engineers and medics than of political and social philosophers.
Distinction
In attempting to distinguish between natural and social obstacles we shall inevitably come across gray areas.
Economic Constraints
Libertarians and egalitarians have provided contrasting answers to this question by appealing to different conceptions of constraints.
Intention
Thus, one way of answering the question is by taking an even more restrictive view of what counts as a constraint on freedom, so that only a subset of the set of obstacles brought about by other persons counts as a restriction of freedom: those brought about intentionally.
Coercion
Critics of libertarianism, on the other hand, typically endorse a broader conception of constraints on freedom that includes not only intentionally imposed obstacles but also unintended obstacles for which someone may nevertheless be held responsible.
Socialism vs Libertarianism
This analysis of constraints helps to explain why socialists and egalitarians have tended to claim that the poor in a capitalist society are as such unfree, or that they are less free than the rich, whereas libertarians have tended to claim that the poor in a capitalist society are no less free than the rich.
Capabilities
Egalitarians typically (though do not always) assume a broader notion than libertarians of what counts as a constraint on freedom.
Constraint
External is ambiguous in this context, for it might be taken to refer either to the location of the causal source of an obstacle or to the location of the obstacle itself.
Dimensions
A first dimension is that of the source of a constraint — in other words, what it is that brings about a constraint on freedom. A second dimension is that of the type of constraint involved.
Conclusion
As a result, it is not clear that theorists who are normally placed in the ‘negative’ camp need deny the existence of internal constraints on freedom.
Steiner
On the one hand, Steiner has a much broader view than Hayek of the possible sources of constraints on freedom.
Action
For Steiner, an agent only counts as unfree to do something if it is physically impossible for her to do that thing.
Impose Costs
Any extension of the constraint variable to include other types of obstacle, such as the costs anticipated in coercive threats, would, in his view, necessarily involve a reference to the agent’s desires.
Coercive Threat
Consider the coercive threat ‘Your money or your life!’.
Punishment
Many laws that are normally thought to restrict negative freedom do not physically prevent people from doing what is prohibited, but deter them from doing so by threatening punishment.
Concept of Freedom
The concept of overall freedom appears to play an important role both in everyday discourse and in contemporary political philosophy.
Meaningfulness
The literal meaningfulness of such claims depends on the possibility of gauging degrees of overall freedom, sometimes comparatively, sometimes absolutely.
Maximizing / Equalizing Freedom
For some libertarian and liberal egalitarian theorists, freedom is valuable as such. Generally speaking, only the first group of theorists finds the notion of overall freedom interesting.
Measuring Overall Freedom
The theoretical problems involved in measuring overall freedom include that of how an agent’s available actions are to be individuated, counted and weighted, and that of comparing and weighting different types (but not necessarily different sources) of constraints on freedom.
Triadic Formula
MacCallum’s framework is particularly well suited to the clarification of such issues. For this reason, theorists working on the measurement of freedom tend not to refer a great deal to the distinction between positive and negative freedom.
Still Useful?
We began with a simple distinction between two concepts of liberty, and have progressed from this to the recognition that liberty might be defined in any number of ways, depending on how one interprets the three variables of agent, constraints, and purposes.
Influence on Discussions
Despite the utility of MacCallum’s triadic formula and its strong influence on analytic philosophers, however, Berlin’s distinction remains an important point of reference for discussions about the meaning and value of political and social freedom.
Self-Mastery
It might be claimed that MacCallum’s framework is less than wholly inclusive of the various possible conceptions of freedom. In particular, it might be said, the concept of self-mastery or self-direction implies a presence of control that is not captured by MacCallum’s explication of freedom as a triadic relation.
Exercise-Concept vs Opportunity-Concept
MacCallum’s triadic relation indicates mere possibilities. If one thinks of freedom as involving self-direction, on the other hand, one has in mind an exercise- concept of freedom as opposed to an opportunity-concept.
Rough Categorization
What perhaps remains of the distinction is a rough categorization of the various interpretations of freedom that serves to indicate their degree of fit with the classical liberal tradition.